Smiley Face, Hand Clap, Poo Swirl - Emojis in B2B Campaigns?

Sometimes I feel like a really dreary arbiter of good taste. When a colleague recently told me about a client using emojis in their B2B email copy I rolled my eyes like a cartoon character.

Then she told me about the results and I had to auto-correct the eye roll, at cartoon speed.

Then she told me that this campaign was happening in France, that bastion of insouciant cool. After I had fallen from my chair, slapped my hand on my forehead and LMAO (if only it were that easy) I decided that it might be time for me to take notice of the emoji in B2B copy.

Is it a short cut to creating connection, a fad? Or instead is it interesting to think about the role of emotion in B2B marketing which in my opinion is often under represented.

What do you think? :)

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As a copywriter there is no shortage of things to be furious about.
Lazy copy, flabby copy, copy that’s not as clever as it thinks it is – sometimes being a copywriter in the wild is easier when you simply don’t look up.
But amongst the legitimate targets of our ire and despair, I personally wouldn’t count the humble emoji.
The copywriter, as a guardian of language, would naturally be unsettled by these brassy little symbols, viewing them as a symptom of a mushrooming laziness in which even the use of sentences has become a crippling burden (as a species, we copywriters do have this capacity for melodrama when the alphabet is threatened).
But as well as a righteous guardianship of language we should also be pioneering its evolution.